Somehow I get the order right and they quiet down when I pass the bag back to them. I’m letting the car drive us home. Like a carriage horse, it seems to know the route by heart. I can finally think about what just happened.
Then again I don’t know what to think. I feel guilty. Wait. No, I don’t. Why don’t I feel guilty? It’s not like we’ve done anything earth shattering. Then again that kiss. And if we weren’t doing something … secret … I would’ve introduced myself to her, right? Instead, I acted like I didn’t know her. So we are up to something. Wait, that’s ridiculous—of course we’re up to something.
At the corner of Broadway and Catalpa it hits me. I don’t care about anything but Craig. Bob. The family. Nothing. That must be why I don’t feel guilty. I’d say I don’t care about Evie but I do care about her in the sense that I wish I had her life. I’ve got to pull it together. I hate being jealous. I’ve never been jealous. Ever. And now I’m blinded by it. I wish I’d known who it was when she walked up. I could’ve memorized more about her. I feel like shit. Maybe I’m coming down with something. Or maybe it’s just that I look like a mess and she … she … she is Evie Riggs. She is married to this perfect guy and she doesn’t appreciate it.
I’m excellent at memorizing phone numbers. Bob programmed every number we could possibly ever need into the phone (the Chinese take-out place. The dry cleaners. Even work numbers like his Foot Locker buyer), but I don’t touch it. Especially speed-dial number one: Mom—cell. The kids use this one so often the number one is worn off. To me, though, it looks like a direct line to my mother. I’m looking at it now, tracing the tiny square button, wiping the gunk off the clear plastic display on the base unit. My head feels so heavy with thought I can barely lift it. What will Craig say when I tell him about today? What if it’s a wake-up call to him—he’ll realize he’ll lose his wife and daughter if she finds out he kissed me and maybe he even thinks I’m a loose cannon who might tell her in a fit of jealous passion. We won’t be friends anymore. So I won’t tell him how she makes me feel vulnerable and small. Insignificant. A phase in Craig’s life.
I finger the speed-dial button with the rubbed-off 1 and I imagine what I’d say if I hit it and heard my mother’s voice.
“Hi, Mom, it’s me,” I’d say. “Can you come over?”
She’d know from my tone that something was wrong and she’d say I’ll be right there.
Or maybe I’d say this: “Hi, Mom. It’s me. I’m in trouble, Mom. Oh, God, tell me what to do. I’ve made a mess of my life. What should I do? Bob and I haven’t had sex in over a year. We barely speak to each other and when we do it’s to fight. Cammy’s in trouble and I don’t know what to do.”
She’d ask, what does Bob think about it and I’d tell her the truth. I’d tell her that the other night, after I told him about Cammy and the drugs and the birth-mother search, he went to his computer. I’d tell her that when I finally went inside after crying by myself on the front steps I looked over his shoulder, assuming he was researching mushrooms or teenage drug use, I saw he was reading something about refinancing mortgages. Something died in me when I saw that, Mom. I don’t know who this person is but he’s not the sort of man I want to be married to. I walked out of the room and fell asleep knowing he would still be at the computer. He’d be at that computer until one or two o’clock in the morning, searching real-estate listings. When he finally does come to bed we sleep like Gumby figures, on our backs, arms bowed out at our sides just short of touching. If I were in bed with Craig we would spoon, and to a bird looking down from above us it would look like we were riding an invisible motorcycle.
It calms Bob to look at houses. Maybe it’s the stillness of the pictures. Maybe it’s the stats he likes: 2bdrm, 2bthm, wdfp, finished basement. He searches and searches and searches. This is all he does. Every single day he comes home from work, interacts with the kids for a little and then parks himself in front of the computer, clicks on his list of “favorites” and visits real-estate listings like some men visit porn sites. The worst part is we aren’t in the market for a new house.
“Hey, Mom?” I’d ask her. “Did you love Dad? Did you wonder if you made a mistake? Did you ever want to walk away from your life? Did you ever meet your lover’s wife and wish you were her?”
That’s what I’d say if I hit speed-dial number one.
Instead, I exhale and call Cammy downstairs. The boys are in the family room working on homework, I think. They’ve probably blown it off and are playing computer games but I don’t give a shit. I fall back on the couch in the living room. Other than driving, this is the first time I’ve sat down all day. I’m exhausted. I hope I can keep my eyes open. Maybe she didn’t hear me and I could grab a catnap. Five minutes with my eyes closed would be bliss. It’s too tempting to tilt over into lying on the couch, so I move to the overstuffed club chair across from it. I trace the curve of the arms. The Oriental rug on the floor is a soft amber Tibetan hand-woven number Bob’s parents gave us when we bought the house. Tea-stained, they call it. It’s gorgeous … very rich looking but not over the top. It blends in perfectly with the room. The colors go well with the portrait of my mother hanging over the mantel. People think I planned it that way. I walk by this picture millions of times a day to the point of not seeing it, but now, sitting here waiting to rock my daughter’s world, I stare at it. The painter caught the folds of the green taffeta dress she wore to a debutante party when she herself was a teenager. She told me how restless she was sitting for this painting, how the bone stays making her bustline look Elizabethan dug into her and left marks in her stomach for hours after her sittings. You can’t tell any of this by looking at it and I wonder if the painter had to make up the half smile on her face. She is serene. Her hair was swept up, but he caught the wisps that didn’t make it. The background, my grandparents’ old house before they moved into a nursing home, looks regal and it seemed that way to me when we visited them. Above Mom’s head is the crystal chandelier that now hangs in our front hall.
Cammy comes in and makes an elaborate show of bored condescension by falling into the couch with I’m here what do you want. I lean forward, putting my elbows on my knees, my hands in a prayer triangle.
“First it’s the black hair,” I say, “which we put up with because we know it’s a phase. The clothes. The face paint. Then it’s the pierced nose. Then the cartilage and I know that’s a phase, too …”
“It’s not a phase, Jesus, I hate it when you say that,” she says. “It’s me. This is who I am! Cameron.”
“Oh, so you’re Cameron now? When did that start?”
“You don’t get it,” she says. “You just don’t understand. You don’t see me. It’s like you think I’m this little kid or something. I’m not a baby anymore.” She is chipping away at the black nail polish on her fingers.
“I know you’re not a five-year-old, Cammy,” I say. “But you’re sixteen, for Christ’s sake—and you’re our daughter and you live under our roof and God help me if I’m not saying the exact same thing my own parents said to me, but here it is. As long as you are under eighteen you will live by our rules. You’re lucky you even have a mother to say that to you. Do you know what your life would be like if I died when you were sixteen like I was when my mother died? Do you have any idea?”
“This is so fucking ridiculous,” she says.
“What did you just say? Don’t you dare speak to me like that. You have about three seconds to change your attitude or—”
“Or what? You’ll put me in a time-out? Jesus. Just like a baby …” She trails off, slumping back into the downy couch pillows so she can bite her cuticles more comfortably. Really attractive.
She’s always in the process of grooming herself, and the irony is she never looks groomed. She looks like she needs the kind of shower that cleans off radioactive waste. A Karen Silkwood shower. Now she’s examining her hair for split ends.
“I know you haven’t been going to soccer,” I say.
She doesn’t even bother to look up. She just shrugs and through the curtain of dirty hair she mutters, “Did you guys really think I’d go? I mean … come on.” She snort-laughs just like Bob does, but God forbid I mention a similarity between them. Cammy’d chew my head off.
“The coach called this morning to say you haven’t been to practice once this week.” I don’t tell her, of course, that I knew this would happen and frankly I don’t care if she goes to soccer or not. United front. United front. United front. “Your father’s going to hit the ceiling when he finds out.”
She looks up at me and stares so intensely I get a chill.
“He’s not my father.” She says this slowly as if English is my second language. I look away. Where do I go from here? What tack am I supposed to take now? She’s right to go to the bigger issue. She’s absolutely right, it’s not about dyed black hair or piercings or soccer. But I don’t know where to go from here.
Maybe she’s right about a lot of things. Maybe this isn’t a phase. The person cold-staring me is a complete stranger. She’s not my sixteen-year-old daughter.
In an unspoken time-out of silence my eyes travel the room, settling on a tennis ball–size mark on the wall just inside the living room. Funny, I haven’t noticed it in ages. The movers left a “trail of destruction”—that’s what Bob called it that night. We both laughed and wandered through the stacks of boxes, looking for other nicks and scrapes, but nothing compared to that angry dent that cut right to the bone of the house. A punch to this, our first house. Chewing deep-dish pizza, Bob said it’d be a cinch to patch over but here it is, almost twenty years later, a signpost in the trail of destruction. Huh. Fitting.
“Mom.” Cammy’s trying to catch my attention. “Can I go now?” She sneers and stands up, but I know she’s challenging me. That girl staring daggers at me a few seconds ago would’ve marched out. She wouldn’t have asked permission, sarcastic though it was. No … this is Cammy again, waiting for me to make the next move. Waiting for me to be a mother. So I inhale and jump back in.
“I want to know who goes to this library parking lot. That’s number one.”
Teenager 101: never let them sense weakness. Ever. So I know I’m buying time with this question, but this is part of the bigger picture. I’ve got to break her down, break her spirit. Then I’ll build her back up. Like the military.
“I don’t know who goes to the parking lot,” she says. “Just … I don’t know, just everyone. Different people. It’s not like you know all of them anyway so why do you care?”
“I care because you’re my daughter and I want to know how long this has been going on. What have you been putting in your backpack to make it look like you’ve been studying there?”
Question number two. Again, this is to give me even more time to think of a plan of attack.
“What do I put in my backpack? Jesus, I don’t know, books and stuff. Makeup. Whatever. Why does this even matter?”
She’s sniffing me out, looking for cracks in the foundation. Looking to see me agree with her on the stupidity of the question, but here is another lesson I have learned—make each question seem as though it’s escalating in importance, because it’ll throw them off the scent. Mix the important questions in with the irrelevant ones. They’ll get so used to answering what they believe are inane questions that by the time you get to the important ones they’ve been lulled into a hypnotic surliness and bam you get the answers you never even knew you were looking for.
“It matters, okay,” I say. “Everything about this matters, Cammy. Oh, sorry, Cameron.”
“See? That’s what I’m talking about. You say my name like it’s some joke, but you named me so why can’t you respect that I want to use a different version of the name you and Bob gave me without you sneering at me the way you are.”
Then she considers something. I watch the wheels turning.
“You guys named me, right?” she asks. “Oh, my God, you didn’t name me? Why didn’t you tell me that? How could you not tell me that!”
“Just slow down,” I say. “We wanted you so badly. We’ve told you that. I knew the minute I laid eyes on you that you were my daughter. It was so natural, the connection was instant, swear to God. I honestly didn’t know it would be like that. I guess I thought there’d be a breaking-in period. But it was instant. When we first saw you, your father—don’t make that face, he is your father—your father said, ‘let’s bring her home.’ We loved your name. It is exactly the name we would have given you. You are a Cameron, through and through. It’s a beautiful name. We adopted you as our daughter and you have our last name because you are our daughter.”
“I don’t care about my last name. Fuck my last name.”
“Stop it! Just stop it. Getting back to what we were talking about … So, what, you’re a druggie now? A Goth druggie. With pitch-black hair. Doing drugs, that’s your thing now? Do you have any idea how dangerous this is? Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”
She gives me a disdainful stare. Yeah, well, I see her blank stare and I raise her a glare of anger so strong I can see her recoil. She’s about to walk into the palm of my hand.
“Answer me,” I say. “Did you think about the consequences of what you did when you decided to do hallucinogenic drugs?”
Another moment of silence, but this is thick with mother-and-daughter-on-the-brink-of-Armageddon.
“Answer me, goddammit.”
Teenager 201: tears always diffuse the situation. Unfortunately, they have seen the playbook on this one.
“Here, here’s some tissue,” I say.
sob “I don’t sob even know sob why I’m crying.”
I soften on this one. I remember that feeling, the wave of emotion, the mood that comes out of nowhere, the embarrassment of uncontrollable tears when all you want to be is tearless and angry.
“I want to know who Paul is,” I say.
Teenager 301: tears stop on a dime.
“What? No one,” she says. “He’s just this guy someone knows. I don’t know.”
“Whose friend is he?”
“I don’t know! Can I go now? I have homework and like a million other things I have to do by tomorrow.”
Teenager 401: know when to step back but only do it temporarily.
“This isn’t over, Cammy. Cameron. This is far from over. Do your homework and we’ll talk later.”
“Can’t wait, Samantha.”
“Watch it.”
“Whatever.”
Teenager 401 Advanced Credit: never let them know you’re doing detective work.
I wish Craig were here to help me—I have a small window of time because I know Cammy will find a way to reach her friends and tell them to scatter from the library parking lot. Somehow she’ll get word to them. We’ve taken away her cell phone and her computer use but somehow she’ll reach them. Like that Supermax prison, the one with the highest level of security where they’re holding the Unabomber—even in there the prisoners find ways to get messages to one another and to the outside world. This is the tricky part.
I wait until Bob comes home and when I see him pull in front of the house, I throw my purse on my shoulder and race out.
“Nice of you to make time for your family,” I say, pushing past him on the front walk. “Thanks for showing up.”
“Fuck you, Sam.”
“Nice. Really nice.”
“Where’re you going?”
“The boys are in the family room, I think, and Cammy’s doing homework, but if anyone asks I’m going out for milk.”
“Oh, Jesus, what now?”
Over the roof of the car I whisper, “I’m going out for milk.” I use the tone you use when you’re telling something in code and you want to be sure the other person gets it. “If you really wanted to know you’d come home a little earlier.”
His shoulders drop and in my rearview mirror I see him dragging himself up to the house. The yellow light at the corner turns red but I run through
it anyway. I roll past a stop sign two blocks away and I slam the pedal up to thirty-five miles an hour up Belmont in between lights. Luckily there’s no traffic this time of night.
There are a few skateboarders practicing jumps under the yellow glow of the streetlights, but otherwise the library parking lot is empty. It looks like a movie set, no trash, perfectly painted white-striped parking spaces far outnumbering what’s needed for the branch. Way in the back of the employee parking area there is a pickup truck, but that is the only car in the place. These are the kind of circumstances judo instructors talk about when describing ways to beat off a would-be attacker. Keys between fisted fingers are useless, they say, because you have to wait until they’re close enough to punch, but by then they will no doubt have overtaken you. No, it’s better to kick and yell “fire” even though you’re facing a rape or murder. People respond to fires. I remind myself these are kids. Kids Cammy’s age (then again, I can’t be sure of this). Kids can’t intimidate me.
“Hey,” I call to a boy with what appears to be a pierced lower lip, though it’s hard to tell in a shadowy casting light that makes everyone look like they have a pierced lower lip. “Any of you guys know a kid named Paul?”
I try to sound tough. Like I’m in a cop show.
“Who wants to know?” the smallest of the four asks. He’s wearing jeans that are too baggy, a hoodie sweatshirt with the hood up and tied so only his eyes and lips are visible. Such a joke, this white kid trying to act ghetto. His clothes are all clean, I can tell even in the streetlamp-lit darkness. I can practically smell the detergent his mother used.
“I do,” I say, matching his haughtiness. “Are you Paul?”